2020 awards eligibility

‘Tis the season again… Below is a list of my award-eligible works published this year. Adapted from my Twitter thread.

Short stories

This year we start with “A Mountain to Climb” in @avatarsinc, edited by the wonderful @AnnVanderMeer. Telepresence (how timely this year!) and a space elevator heist.

Next up was “Goal Invariance Under Radical Self-Modification” in @AShvartsman‘s Future SF. Job loss to AI, AI therapy, self-modification of human and artificial intelligence.

Then came “Tones of Memories” in Coppice & Brake by @rachelabrune. Horror this time, not SF. Czech history, WWII, Nazism, Communism, music, ghosts, survival, fight for freedom.

Followed “Second Generation” in a special medical SF issue of Future SF, edited by @rmAmbrose. Mars settlement, Martian babies, medical mystery, AI, habitability. Called ‘medical mystery solved with typical human ingenuity and panache‘.

Novelettes

The Curtain Falls, The Show Must End” in Samovar started my 2020 novelette season. This historical fantasy set in 1938 Prague revolves around the Neue deutsche Theater and its mix of people and worldviews in refugees from Nazi Germany, liberal Czech Germans as well as Nazi supporters in the ensemble. When a ghost starts terrorizing the opera house already overflowing with tension, an aging writer Paul Leppin [based upon a real historical figure] reluctantly chooses to help the theatre… but in doing so, he might lose himself.

I have a new SF mystery novelette in my otherwise reprint collection The Ship Whisperer. “We Shadows” features multiple personalities, body and mind modification, circuses, and of course a mystery…

Then, “Long Iapetan Night” came out in Asimov’s (Nov/Dec 2020 issue). It was described as ‘frozen terror … that will unsettle even the bravest of us‘, ‘nice mix of hard science fiction and horror‘, ‘vividly portrays both the beauty and the terror of space‘ and ‘a good story with a very good ending‘. It’s accompanied by my nonfiction post on Asimov’s blog.

Best Related Work

Then of course Strangest Of All, the astrobiological SF anthology I edited for @EAIastrobiology! The stories are reprints, but all the nonfiction texts I wrote are brand new; the whole project falls under Best Related Work. I hope we made a difference with it, and definitely plan to follow up on it.

Other projects

Finally, since in theory works published in other languages than English are eligible for some awards, let me remind you of the #RUR centenary fiction anthology ROBOT100 by @MojeArgo. My ROBOT100 story “Vada ve výrobě” (“A Flaw in The Works”) features a robot contemplating the human genocide in the light of imminent first contact with an interstellar civilization.

Then there’s of course the nonfiction anthology Robot 100: Sto rozumů by @CejkovaJitka (eligible under Best Related Work). However, that one is also coming in English next year, so let’s perhaps wait for the English 2021 edition ;).

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